History Camp Discussion about the Outbreak of War, 6 Feb.

This Thursday, 6 February, at 8:00 P.M. Samuel A. Forman and I will appear live on the History Camp Author Discussion feed, talking about the Battle of Lexington and Concord with Lee Wright and Mary Adams and taking audience questions.

Sam is the author of Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill, and the Birth of American Liberty. He shared a great deal of his research for that book on his Joseph Warren website.

Sam and I are both members of the board of The Pursuit of History, Inc., the non-profit organization that organizes History Camp, these online author discussions, and the Pursuit of History Weekends, including the upcoming look at “The Outbreak of War” on 3–6 April. So we’ll talk about those things, too. 

One of the overlaps between my book and Sam’s is Dr. Joseph Warren’s 10 Feb 1775 letter to Samuel Adams, kept at the New York Public Library. It gives a vivid picture of the tension inside redcoat-occupied Boston 250 years ago:

We were this Morning alarmed with A Report that A Party of Soldiers was sent to Cambridge with Design to disperse the [Massachusetts Provincial] Congress many here believed it was in Consequence of what was Yesterday published by their Order, I confess I paid so much Regard to it as to be sorry I was not with my Friends and Altho, my Affairs would not allow of it I went down to the Ferry in a Chaise with Dr. [Benjamin] Church both determined to share with our Brethren in any Dangers that they might be engaged in but we there heard that the Party had quietly passed the Bridge on their Way to Roxbury up[on]. which we returned Home.

I have spent an Hour this Morning with Deacon [William] Phillips and am concerned that our Existence as a free People absolutely depends in acting with Spirit & Vigor, the Ministry declare our Resolution to preserve our Liberty and the common People there are made to believe we are a Nation of noisy Cowards, the Ministry are supported in their Plan of answering us by Assurances that we have not Courage enough to fight for our Freedom, even they who wish us well dare not openly declare for us lest we should meanly desert ourselves and leave them alone to content with Administrations, who they know will be politically speaking, omnipotent if America should submit to them,

Deacon Phillips Dr. Church and myself are all fully of Opinion that it would be a very proper Step should the Congress order A Schooner to [?] be sent Home with an accurate State of Facts, or it is certain that Letters to and from our Friends in England are intercepted, and every Method taken to prevent the People of Gt. Britain from gaining a Knowledge of the true State of this Country— I intended to have consulted with you had I been at Cambridge to Day on the Propriety of A Motion for that Purpose—but must defer it untill to Morrow—

One thing however I have upon my Mind which I think ought to be immediately attended to—the Resolution of the Congress published Yesterday greatly affects one [Obadiah] Whiston who has hitherto been thought firm in our Cause but is now making Carriages for the Army—He assisted in getting the four Field Pieces to Colo. [Lemuel] Robinson’s at Dorchester, where they are now, He says the Discovery of this will make him,—and He threatens to make the Discovery, perhaps Resentment and the Hope of gain may together prevail with him to act the Traitor—

Dr. Church and I are clear that it ought not to be one Minute in his Power to point out [to] the General [Thomas Gage] the Place in which they are kept but that they ought to be removed without pray do not omit to obtain proper Orders concern’g them

Whiston the blacksmith was cut out of the Patriot organization; eventually he left Boston as a Loyalist in March 1776. The committee of safety convinced Robinson to turn over those “four Field Pieces” so they could be moved further from Boston—out to Concord, in fact. However, since Dr. Church was or would soon be in Gage’s pay, the general tracked them out to that town. 

After war did break out, one of Dr. Warren’s first actions as head of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress was to assemble an account of the first battle from the Patriot perspective and send it by specially hired ship to London, just as this letter proposed.

This letter is one of many documents that show the Massachusetts Patriots making plans to respond to a British army action. Of course, every bit of military preparation convinced Gov. Gage that those men were planning an armed rebellion.

Back when Sam and I were writing our books, we had to go to New York to see that letter. Now it’s been digitized for anybody to read (though searching for it is still a challenge).

Going to Work for the Feds

In exploring the Creating a Federal Government website, I saw a fair number of familiar names.

Then as now, government officials appointed military veterans to civilian posts. Thus, I see significant appointments in the U.S. Customs department going to:

• Thomas Melvill (1751–1832, shown here) of the Boston Tea Party and the Massachusetts artillery regiment, holding various positions in Boston from 1789 until 1830, just two years before his death. (Melvill actually started working in Customs in 1786, before the Constitution put the office on a new footing.)
• John Popkin (1743–1827), lieutenant colonel in the Continental artillery, who worked for the Customs for at least a decade after his farm in Bolton failed and he needed to support his family.
• John Foster Williams (1743–1814) of the Massachusetts navy ship Protector, commanding a revenue cutter.

Likewise, a lot of men who were active in Boston’s Whig movement before the war got posts in the state government during and after it.

I also saw some familiar names which turned out to be men with appointments a generation or more after the Revolution. I wonder if they’re descendants of the Patriots, named after a Revolutionary ancestor and perhaps leveraging the family name and connections.

On interesting example is Francis C. Whiston (1798–1878), a Customs employee from 1824 to 1828. He later related how the Marquis de Lafayette handed him a masonic apron after laying the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825.

Francis C. Whiston’s grandfather Obadiah Whiston was a blacksmith in pre-war Boston, ready to tussle with British soldiers during the 1768–1770 occupation. In late 1774 he helped to hide two of the militia cannon I wrote about in The Road to Concord. But in January 1775 the Patriot leaders heard rumors he was talking about switching sides and divulging where those guns had been taken, so they cut him out of the network. The blacksmith had to leave town with the British military in March 1776.

I don’t know if Obadiah Whiston’s wife and sons stayed behind or sailed away with him and returned, but his grandson was working for the federal government fifty years later.

TOMORROW: Sorting out Lovells.

The Riot against the Neck Guard

I have still more to share about the Otis-Robinson brawl, but sestercentennial anniversaries are catching up, so I’ll have to get back to that story. That fight was just the start of an uptick of violence in the fall of 1769.

The next confrontation started on the night of 23 October, when a housewright and Whig activist named Robert Pierpont (also spelled “Peirpoint”) went to the British army guardhouse on Boston Neck. Pierpont owned land nearby, and he had already complained about soldiers stealing his firewood.

Under the Quartering Act of 1765, when the British government stationed soldiers in a town, the local government was supposed to supply housing and firewood. Boston had already balked at the housing back in 1768, and I don’t doubt they resisted supplying firewood as well. As the nights grew cooler, soldiers might not have worried about the such legalities.

The officers of the Neck guard sent Peirpoint away. Sgt. James Hickman and four men of the 14th Regiment later testified that the local man warned “he would go home where he had a brace of Pistols, would Load them and Fire at the first Soldier that came in his way belonging to the Guard.”

The next morning, a little before 10:00 A.M., a constable came to the guardhouse and asked for the officer in charge, Ens. John Ness. He brought a warrant from justice of the peace Richard Dana for “Stealing wood, assaulting, and knocking down one Robt Peirpoint,” in the ensign’s words.

Ens. Ness refused to leave his post until his shift was done. In other words, he placed the authority of the army over the authority of the local legal system. Instead, the young officer promised to obey the summons after he went off duty. The constable was satisfied with that. And really he didn’t have the force to make an army officer protected by armed soldiers do anything.

But there was force in numbers. Ness recalled: “Some minutes after, Peirpoint with a Number of People, came to the Front of the Guard room abusing, and pressing in upon the Centinels.” Ness assembled his whole guard with their bayonets fixed. For fifteen minutes there was a stand-off, during which “the Mob increased, keeping a little distance from us, throwing dirt, and Giveing a great deal of abuse.”

Then another squad of soldiers arrived to take over the post on the Neck. Ness formed his troops into lines to march them back to their barracks. The crowd, seeing no sign of the officer obeying the legal summons, grew angry. They started “Throwing Stones” at the soldiers. One man was hit “in the Face which made the Blood flow from his mouth and nose,” comrades recalled.

Ens. Ness declared:

In forming the Guard again, which by the Crowding in of the People had been divided, a Firelock, which had been loaded unknown to me went off, on hearing the report I turned about to the Guard, and gave positive orders for no Soldier to Load or Strike any of the Mob.

But that shot had hit the doorway of a forge where a young blacksmith named Obadiah Whiston was working. This was, as far as I can tell, the first gunshot in Boston’s Revolutionary history.

Enraged, Whiston ran after the squad to attack the soldier who had fired, Pvt. William Fowler. Ness said the blacksmith caught up opposite “the Officers Barracks of the 14th Regiment,” coming up on the right side of the troops. Fowler said Whiston “Struck him with a piece of a brick, which Cutt his head in a desperate manner, and for some time deprived him of his Sences.”

Whiston charged up a second time. Sgt. Hickman testified that he “placed the Butt end of my Halbred before him to hinder him from passing, but without striking or doing the said Whiston the least Violence.” Ens. Ness kept his soldiers moving, Fowler now staggering. He got the men “into the Barrack yard” and reported to the regimental commander, Col. William Dalrymple. Despite the crowd throwing rocks, despite Fowler’s musket firing, despite Whiston’s counterattacks, no one had been killed.

The conflict then moved to the courts. Ens. Ness reported to Justice Dana to answer Pierpont’s warrant. Meanwhile, Whiston hurried to a magistrate to swear out a complaint against Sgt. Hickman for assaulting him. The next day, Pvt. Fowler tried to start an action against Whiston, and Ness received a second summons, issued by Dana, John Ruddock, and Samuel Pemberton, for having his men fire on the people.

The proceedings that followed over the next few days showed how biased those Whig magistrates were against the soldiers. They tried to put off Fowler’s complaint. They ignored Pierpont shaking his fist and threatening Ness during the proceedings. They refused to hear testimony from soldiers. They declined to accept bail from a British officer and a Customs solicitor. When Sgt. Hickman was finally released, the crowd yelled, “Bail him with a Rope!” Soldiers said the hatter Thomas Handysyd Peck was particularly abusive. After officers complained about that behavior, Justice Dana declared “that he was deaf and could not hear…any abuse.”

Eventually all those court cases fizzled out. But the Neck guard riot raised tensions in Boston in late October 1769, 250 years ago.

(The map above shows the British fortifications on the Neck during the siege of 1775-76. Back in 1769, there was just a gate and a guardhouse. And a pile of firewood.)

“He assisted in getting the four Field Pieces”

Have I mentioned that the book launch for The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War is tonight?

Here’s a bit from another document that informed the book, a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren to Samuel Adams dated 10 Jan 1775:

One thing however I have upon my Mind which I think ought to be immediately attended to—the Resolution of the Congress published Yesterday greatly affects one [Obadiah] Whiston who has hitherto been thought firm in our Cause but is now making Carriages for the Army—

He assisted in getting the four Field Pieces to Colo. [Lemuel] Robinson’s at Dorchester, where they are now, He says the Discovery of this will make him,—and He threatens to make the Discovery, perhaps Resentment and the Hope of gain may together prevail with him to act the Traitor—

Dr. [Benjamin] Church and I are clear that it ought not to be one Minute in his Power to point out [to] the General [Thomas Gage] the Place in which they are kept but that they ought to be removed without

pray do not omit to obtain proper Orders concern’g them

Alerting Samuel Adams to have those cannon moved before the royal authorities could seize them? That was smart. Talking it over with Dr. Church first? In retrospect, not such a good idea.

Remembering the Revolutionary War Veterans of Cincinnati

At 1:00 today, the Cincinnati chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution will have a public ceremony honoring Revolutionary War veterans at the Spring Grove Cemetery, as described on the Cincinnati Enquirer’s website.

In 1976, the Daughters of the American Revolution installed a marker at Spring Grove listing 35 Revolutionary veterans known to have been buried there. However, further research has added 25 more names. Some were interred there but not recognized as veterans before. Others were buried at another cemetery in the city before it was turned into a park in the 1850s; their descendants were invited to move their remains, if any, to Spring Grove, but not every family had relatives or resources to do so.

Among the Cincinnati veterans to be added to the marker is Cambridge native Joshua Wyeth (1758-1829). In his case, it’s just a guess that he was even in the first cemetery since there’s no record or description of his burial.

However, Cincinnati’s newspapers recorded Wyeth’s passing in 1829 because he was the city’s link to the Boston Tea Party. (His Find-a-Grave page shows one obituary, along with the wrong year for his death. [ADDENDUM: This is now corrected.]) In fact, Wyeth was the first participant in the destruction of the tea to recount the event for public consumption and one of the first people quoted in print using the term “Tea Party” to describe it.

In 1773, Joshua Wyeth was working in Boston as an apprentice of blacksmith Obadiah Whiston, a fervent Son of Liberty. Four years earlier, Whiston had charged into the ranks of a British army squad and slugged a soldier for accidentally firing a musket ball into the doorway of his forge. In 1770, Whiston was on the scene of the Boston Massacre. In 1774, Whiston hid two brass cannon stolen from a militia armory inside his shop for several weeks.

But in early 1775, Dr. Joseph Warren began to suspect Whiston was ready to switch over to the Crown and reveal what he knew about those cannon. The Patriots quickly moved the guns to Concord and cut Whiston out of their network. In March 1776 he left Massachusetts with the British military. Though his family was back in Boston within a few years, I’ve found no evidence of Obadiah Whiston’s return.

That shift was probably confusing to young Joshua Wyeth. He remembered it as, “Western, at the time [of the Tea Party], was neutral, but afterwards became a tory.” According to his pension application, Wyeth had left his master and was out of Boston in time for the Battle of Bunker Hill. Family genealogy says he also got married in 1775 to Pauline or Emaline Jones, when he was no more than seventeen. Later he married twice more, fathered twenty-one children, and moved to Ohio.

(Today is, of course, the anniversary of the first full-scale battle of America’s Revolutionary War. By coincidence, it also marks a smaller milestone: this is the 3,000th posting on Boston 1775.)

“It serves to call to remembrance”

In June 1875, fifty years after the Marquis de Lafayette participated in the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument—an event largely organized by Massachusetts’s Freemasons—another participant donated a relic of that event to the Massachusetts Grand Lodge.

Francis C. Whiston explained:

At the close of the ceremony, and after the delivery of the magnificent oration by Daniel Webster, the Masonic portion of the assembly unclothed, preparatory to proceeding to what was more properly known as Bunker Hill, where a sumptuous dinner was partaken of by several thousand persons. As my position, as one of the marshals of the day, gave me the opportunity of being near the person of General Lafayette, I received from him, in that graceful, bland, and affable manner so peculiar to himself, the Masonic apron he had worn during the ceremonies of the day, and which I have faithfully preserved as a valuable memento of that great man, and the interesting and important event it serves to call to remembrance.

Whiston gave the apron to the lodge, which still holds it.

Ironically, Whiston’s grandfather Obadiah Whiston, a Boston blacksmith, had left Massachusetts with the British military in March 1776 under suspicion of leaking some of the Patriots’ most sensitive secrets to the Crown. I’m not sure he ever actually did, and his widow and children were back in Massachusetts soon after the war (if they ever left). But Francis C. probably didn’t say much about that part of his family history, if he even knew.

The image above, sheet music for “The Bunker Hill Quick-Step,” appears in the Boston Public Library’s Flickr collection of Bunker Hill Monument images.

Digging Deeper into Joshua Wyeth’s Story

Yesterday I laid out my reasons for doubting the account of the Boston Tea Party which Francis S. Drake credited to Joshua Wyeth in Tea Leaves, and which is widely quoted elsewhere.

On the other side of the question, while researching Defiance of the Patriots Ben Carp decided that Wyeth was basically credible. As early as 1820, years before he started to get newspaper coverage, Wyeth swore that he “was on board the East India Company’s ships in the Harbour of Boston [and] assisted in throwing the tea overboard.” That was part of his application for a Revolutionary War pension. Ben argued that Wyeth had:

• no reason to lie—being at the Tea Party had no bearing on whether he was legally eligible for a pension.
• good reasons to tell the truth—he was under oath, and his credibility about his wartime service was on the line.

Wyeth got his pension, and his basic story didn’t change over the years.

In addition, in the account Wyeth gave to the Rev. Timothy Flint in Cincinnati in 1827, he recalled the last names of four other participants: “Frothingham, Mead, Martin and Grant.” The first list of participants, compiled in Boston (where people were initially skeptical about Wyeth’s claims) and published in 1835, included Nathaniel Frothingham, Moses Grant, and man named Martin (later identified as John).

Despite those things, I was still skeptical, and figured Wyeth’s credibility would remain something Ben and I would never resolve to both our satisfaction. But this month I dug below Drake’s quotation of Wyeth’s words in Tea Leaves to the original source, and I discovered that Drake hadn’t really quoted Wyeth.

Here’s the sentence that had made me dubious:

It was proposed that young men, not much known in town, and not liable to be easily recognized, should lead in the business. Most of the persons selected for the occasion were apprentices and journeymen, not a few of them, as was the case with myself, living with tory masters.

That was actually an amalgamation of sentences in Flint’s article, which starts in the editor’s own voice:

It was proposed, that young men, not much known in town, and not liable to be easily recognized, should lead in the business. Our narrator believes, that most of the persons selected for the occasion were apprentices and journeymen; not a few of them, as was the case with himself, living with tory masters. He had but a few hours warning, of what was intended to be done. The part which he took in the business, is related as follows, and nearly in his own words.

I labored, as a journeyman blacksmith, with Western & Gridley, blacksmiths by trade, and Baptists by profession. Western, at the time, was neutral, but afterwards became a tory.

So Wyeth didn’t say that he’d lived with a Tory master in 1773. Wyeth accurately recalled that his master Obadiah Whiston made a political conversion after the Tea Party (though the word “neutral” understates how active Whiston had been before then).

The narrative in Wyeth’s own words that follows never describes a decision about who should destroy the tea; that earlier line appears to have been a conclusion that Flint drew. Wyeth presented himself as one of several dozen young men in Boston muttering about what to do with the tea, but he doesn’t seem to have been privy to the real decision-making or planning. During the tea destruction he comes across as a useful grunt, hauling up those heavy chests; he doesn’t puff up his own role.

Three details are still inaccurate:

• In his mid-teens, Joshua Wyeth was very unlikely to be a “journeyman” as he called himself, though he may not have been legally indentured.
• The ships were at Griffin’s Wharf, not Hancock’s Wharf. That looks like a simple memory lapse by someone who’d been away from Boston for decades. And according to Ebenezer Stevens, one of the tea ships did spend time at Hancock’s wharf before being moved.
• No “brigade of British soldiers was encamped on the common, less than a mile from the wharf.” There were soldiers at Castle William and warships in the harbor, but the British military never moved against the activists. Wyeth appears to have added that detail, possibly remembered from other times when there were soldiers on Boston Common, to produce a more exciting narrative.

Do those contradictions sink Wyeth’s entire credibility? Not for me, not anymore. Right now, contrary to my earlier position, I’m inclined to accept his basic accuracy. Which goes to show the importance of finding the earliest sources.

And thus ends Boston 1775’s retrospect on the Tea Party for the year 2010.

Tea Party Boys “Living with Tory Masters”?

When Ben Carp was writing Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America, we disagreed about Joshua Wyeth, the first man associated with the phrase “Boston Tea Party.” Ben thought that there was enough evidence to make him basically credible. I was suspicious about his story of helping destroy the East India Company’s tea in 1773.

Here’s how Francis S. Drake quoted Wyeth’s account in the magazine Old and New in 1874 and his book Tea Leaves in 1884:

It was proposed that young men, not much known in town, and not liable to be easily recognized, should lead in the business. Most of the persons selected for the occasion were apprentices and journeymen, not a few of them, as was the case with myself, living with tory masters.

Why, I asked, would the Boston radicals select apprentices and journeymen for this sensitive job which required minimal violence when the mindset of the time was that boys and young, unanchored men easily went out of control?

Even more important, why would they entrust such a big secret to boys who depended on known Loyalists for their food, clothing, shelter, and future livelihood?

And most important, I said, Joshua Wyeth was not living with a “tory master” in 1773. He recalled working for a blacksmith named “Watson” or “Western.” That man was actually Obadiah Whiston, and actually a mighty big radical. Here’s Whiston’s rap sheet:

• 24 Oct 1769: As a British army company marched back from the gate on Boston Neck, a crowd followed them, shouting and throwing stuff, because their officer refused to answer a warrant about stealing firewood. One soldier’s musket went off, the bullet striking the doorway of Whiston’s forge on Orange Street. He shoved his way into the ranks and slugged that soldier in the face.
• 5 Mar 1770: Alarm bells rang in the center of town, and Whiston ran in that direction. Someone told him there was no fire, only a fight between civilians and soldiers. So Whiston went on ahead, ready to get some punches in. Later he testified to town magistrates about the ensuing Boston Massacre.
• October 1774: Whiston hid two purloined militia cannons in his forge so that the British army couldn’t confiscate them, and helped the Patriots smuggle them out to a tavern in Dorchester.

Those don’t seem like the actions of a Loyalist.

Whiston became a “tory” in early 1775—a switch that’s still mysterious. On 5 February, Dr. Joseph Warren wrote to Samuel Adams that the blacksmith “has hitherto been thought firm in our cause, but is now making carriages for the army.” That change must have thrown his apprentices for a loop.

And Wyeth must have been an apprentice, despite Drake calling him “a journeyman blacksmith in the employ of Watson and Gridley.” He was only sixteen years old, not close to being a legal adult.

My theory was that at the Tea Party Joshua Wyeth was just a wannabe or hanger-on. Maybe he was one of the teenagers who pushed their way into the event and were put to cleaning up. But the account attributed to him just didn’t make logical sense or fit the historic facts.

After moving out to Cincinnati, I theorized, Wyeth found he was the only Boston man around—the only source of stories about the famous pre-Revolutionary troubles. Wyeth could turn himself from an apprentice to a journeyman. He could describe being summoned to help destroy the tea. He could explain to the world that having a “tory master” was actually an asset, not a reason for suspicion. He could come up with the cute name “Boston Tea Party.” And there was no one around to contradict anything he said.

That wasn’t just my theory. Back in 1827, after the Western Monthly Review published a profile of Wyeth as a Tea Party participant, the Boston Gazette fired back. As I’ve already noted, the editor of that paper, Benjamin Russell, kept track of Bostonians who had been at the Tea Party. His Gazette noted errors in Wyeth’s account, including the detail about young men being chosen to “lead in the business,” and insisted that at most Wyeth had been a spectator.

Hard-nosed skeptics like Russell and me might be responsible for the footnote in Defiance of the Patriots acknowledging that Wyeth’s account might contain some fudged details.

TOMORROW: Digging deeper into Wyeth’s story.